Gamifying rehabilitation is an efficient way to improve motivation and exercise frequency. However, between flow theory, self-determination theory or Bartle’s player types there is much room for speculation regarding the mechanics required for successful gamification, which in turn leads to increased motivation. For our study, we selected a gamified solution for motion training (an exergame) where the playful design elements are extremely simple.

The contribution is three-fold: we show best practices from the state of the art, present a study analyzing the effects of simple gamification mechanics on a quantitative and on a qualitative level and discuss strategies for playful design in therapeutic movement games.

Presentation

The paper has been presented on June 23 at PETRA ’17, the 10th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments.

While human emotions have been researched for decades, designing authentic emotional behavior for non-human characters has received less attention. However, virtual behavior not only affects game design, but also allows creating authentic avatars or robotic companions.

After a discussion of methods to model and recognize emotions, we present three characters with a decreasing level of human features and describe how established design techniques can be adapted for such characters.

In a study, 220 participants assess these characters’ emotional behavior, focusing on the emotion “anger”. We want to determine how reliable users can recognize emotional behavior, if characters increasingly do not look and behave like humans. A secondary aim is determining if gender has an impact on the competence in emotion recognition.

The findings indicate that there is an area of insecure attribution of virtual affective behavior not distant but close to human behavior. We also found that at least for anger, men and women assess emotional behavior equally well.